Installing PIP Python 3.6.3 Ubuntu 16.04 Zlib Not Available, But It's Installed

Question

I'm trying to follow this tutorial on installing Python 3.6.3 and PIP with virtual environments, but when I get to sudo python3.6 get-pip.py I get the error

Traceback (most recent call last):
      File "get-pip.py", line 20061, in <module>
        main()
      File "get-pip.py", line 194, in main
    bootstrap(tmpdir=tmpdir)
      File "get-pip.py", line 82, in bootstrap
        import pip
    zipimport.ZipImportError: can't decompress data; zlib not available

but I have zlib1g-dev installed and don't know how to fix this problem. I've googled a lot and tried reinstalling, but haven't had any success.

Sorry to start a new question, but I did not have enough Karma to comment on the other one. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Update: I ended up installing everything from source instead of using any packages and it seems to be working. I was not able to solve the problem, but found an alternative way to get things working.

Answer 1

For pip to work, Python needs to be linked to the zlib library when Python itself is installed. It appears that either zlib was not installed when you installed Python, or at least that the Python installer couldn't locate it. To help it along, you may issue the following before installing Python. In bash syntax,

zlib_lib="/usr/lib32"
zlib_inc="/usr/include"
export CPPFLAGS="-I${zlib_inc} ${CPPFLAGS}"
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH="${zlib_lib}:${LD_LIBRARY_PATH}"
export LDFLAGS="-L${zlib_lib} -Wl,-rpath=${zlib_lib} ${LDFLAGS}"

Here I've assumed that zlib is installed under /usr/lib32 and /usr/include/. To check this, look for the libz.so.1 file in the "lib" directory and the zlib.h file in the "inc" directory. If you find them somewhere else, simply change zlib_lib and zlib_inc accordingly.

Answer 2

IF you have different versions of Python installed it is likely the install is on another version. for example. I have pyperclip in 3.6.3 32bit version, but I an not access it in 3.6.3 64bit or 3.7.2dev.